There are few souls who are as passionate about mobiles as the game of cricket.

The September event of Mobile Monday (MoMo) coincided with the India-Pakistan 20-20 finals. But 35 people attended the meet despite the match.

Ashim Roy, vice-president of Comat Technologies Pvt. Ltd, spoke on the economic opportunities for mobiles in rural areas. Comat is a social enterprise that provides e-governance and B2C (business-to-consumer) IT services to rural communities in India. A bulk of Comat’s activities are centred on providing information access to rural areas—it has set up 800 kiosks across Karnataka that offer various services. According to Roy, some of the most popular services were on the mobile platform—mobile top-ups and exam results via SMS.

Keeping to the tradition of a speaker and a demo, this MoMo combined the talk with a product demo, but with a difference. Mobisy, a start-up that works on mobile user interface, actually did a private beta launch of its product at the event. Lalit Bhise, CEO of Mobisy, gave the audience a sneak preview of it mobile application platform Mobitop. The platform gives developers access to API’s (application programming interface that communicates between computer programmes) in open Web standard technologies to create applications. The demo kicked off a discussion on the possibilities of the platform, competition and business models.

While there is so much chatter about Web OS (operating systems), this might just usher in an era of mobile Web OS. And given the mobile growth rate, it might even zoom past the Web version.

Thiyagarajan M. is co-founder of mobile start-up Motvik. He was also instrumental in starting the Bangalore and Hyderabad chapters of Mobile Monday.